


objects in space

by Likedeadends



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Breakup Fic, Implied Cheating, M/M, Songfic, Toxic Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:21:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27742921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likedeadends/pseuds/Likedeadends
Summary: Johnny looks at what Kun left behind and tries to see it for what it really is; junk.
Relationships: Suh Youngho | Johnny/Qian Kun
Comments: 2
Kudos: 24





	objects in space

“I can’t do this anymore.” 

It stung at the time, but it’s faded now. The ache is one like an old broken bone, not quite healed, but only really hurting when it rains. 

Johnny feels like a ghost in his house most of the time, retracing the same steps like maybe something will change if he just stays the course. Like maybe one day he’ll shuffle into the kitchen and the coffee maker will work again, Kun humming over it while his vanilla latte brews. 

The coffee maker has been broken for months. There’s still a used k-cup inside of it. Johnny tells himself he’ll get to cleaning tomorrow (he says that every day). 

And that’s the issue, isn’t it? 

Maybe he isn’t the ghost, but is instead being haunted. The house is still filled with shadows of Kun and their relationship. He is a host, welcoming the entity and keeping the curtains drawn tight so that it never feels tempted to leave.

The k-cup in the coffee maker. The crooked frame on the wall that bore the brunt of their last fight. The cheesy “his & his” pillow set on the couch. 

All relics of the past that Johnny hesitates to touch. Sometimes he’ll get stuck in his normal path from the bedroom to the kitchen and back. He’ll ruminate on a tchotchke, pour over it like a dedicated museum visitor, allowing it to take him to the place in history where it came from. 

He’s stopped now and staring at a pair of kitschy salt and pepper shakers and his lips threaten to smile, knocking cobwebs off unused muscles. 

\-- 

“You can’t be serious, John! We hardly even sit for dinner, why do we need them?” Kun said, laughing brightly as Johnny held up the lobster shaped kitchen utensils. 

“To make you stop being so crabby!” The salt shaker snuck closer to Kun, one fake claw pinching at his arm. Johnny made a clicking noise.

“Wrong crustacean,” Kun teased, but ultimately let Johnny pinch his skin. He let Johnny buy the set, too. 

\--

The lobsters are bright red and taunt Johnny from their perch on the kitchen counter. Kun was right, they never used them. 

Johnny hums the Rock Lobster tune and absently picks up both of them— they’re empty. 

He’s out of routine today, moving from the kitchen to the dining room and setting the shakers in their rightful place on the dining room table. 

The dining room is bleak. Dust has settled rather thickly over the small table, marring the dark finish and making it look a more muddy gray. It’s uninviting. Johnny draws a smiley face in the mess and leaves the room again, retreating back to the safety of what’s familiar. 

Taeyong insists that the hurt will go away soon. Yuta texts him constantly asking to go out. Taeil is a soft comfort, visiting from next door once in awhile and offering to take out Johnny’s trash for him. 

It’s all in vain. 

Johnny knows he won’t heal until he moves on, but he won’t move on because there’s always a possibility that Kun will come back. That’s why Johnny won’t clean up. When (read: if) Kun comes back, he shouldn’t have to feel like anything’s changed. Johnny kept the spaces for him open, kept his side of the bed warm.

He framed the painting from their trip to Chicago, like Kun had constantly asked him to do. 

\--

“The walls are kind of bare...” Kun said, an arm wrapped lazily around Johnny’s waist, chin hooked over his shoulder. 

They were visiting the city and Johnny was making Kun play tourist. A street vendor had gorgeous paintings laid out of the skyline, Johnny couldn’t stop himself from walking by a little more slowly. Kun took pity and stopped. 

“But there’s that wallpaper you’ve been wanting.” Johnny said softly, hand settling over Kun’s and tracing his knuckles. They had been working on compromising. 

“We both know I’m never going to put it up, baby. Just get the painting.” It came sealed with a kiss on his cheek. 

Johnny’s smile was unwavering the rest of the trip. 

——- 

He considers the painting for a while. It doesn’t take up too much space in their entryway, but it’s a completely different style than the rest of the art Kun hung. 

It’s done in bright colors, exactly the way Johnny sees Kun. 

He crosses the space to take the picture from the wall. He’s not sure what makes him do it, but he goes back to the dining room, lays the picture on the table next to the lobsters and above the lopsided smiley face. 

There’s something cohesive there, like all the color in the house came from memories with Kun. 

The rest of the day putters along similarly. 

Johnny abandons his work in favor of this scavenger hunt. He realizes that picking out these artifacts makes him feel close to Kun again, he ignores the way his cheeks wet from time to time. 

When the sun’s setting and casting a pinkish glow into the dining room (the curtains are open), Johnny stands back to admire his work. 

It’s kind of sad. 

There are piles of papers on the left side of the table: love letters, parking tickets, the essay they worked on together in high school. In the middle, the knick knacks. Decorative fruit, dried flowers from their first date, a half melted candle that Kun loves but gave Johnny a headache. And on the right side, by itself, a small black box. It sits at the head of the table, where the phantom of Kun eats dinner alone. 

In hindsight, collecting the bulk of their memories was only gearing Johnny up to grab the box. It was hidden in a lamp in their guest bedroom. The door to that room hadn’t been opened since Kun left. 

Staring at everything laid out together, Johnny feels his heart clenching. This is his tribute to who they were together. While every memory is sweet, Johnny tries to see it all for what it really is: junk. 

It’s just stuff. 

He’s been too scared to use any of it, worried he would tarnish the memories attached. But it’s just stuff. The memories live in his head. 

He stares at the monument for a while longer, swaying on his feet and letting each item retell it’s story. 

It’s bittersweet. 

Johnny feels inspired to do something bold. It’s been four months, seven days, and sixteen hours since Kun packed up and ran away. It’s been long enough. 

Johnny decides to reach out. 

The memories are so sweet to him, he thinks Kun would feel the same way. He snaps a picture and opens up a new text conversation with his most visited contact. He erases the last message that was sitting in the drafts ( _i love you, i love you, i love you_ ) and types something new.

**Johnny: Hey, do you want any of this?  
Johnny: [image attached] **

His heart pounds when he hits send. It’s perfectly innocuous, set up so that Kun goes on the same trip down memory lane and realizes he’s still in love with Johnny. That they were capable of compromise and understanding and loving each other through anything.

Johnny refuses to move until he gets a response. He’s actually pleasantly surprised when his phone vibrates less than three minutes later. 

**Kun: I thought you would’ve thrown that stuff away by now. I don’t want any of it.**

Fuck. 

The flippancy is like another trinket, another trigger, that brings back an old memory. 

—- 

“I love you,” Johnny whispered, Kun beside him on the couch and typing away on his computer-- work emails, he would say, brushing Johnny off even when it was nearly midnight. 

“You too,” Kun said back, the subtlest shift in his posture putting some more distance between them. Johnny frowned. 

It had been like this for quite some time. They graduated together and started jobs together and moved into this tiny little white picket fence dream home together. Kun worked promotions for a tech startup and Johnny started out as a freelance writer. The interests were similar, not parallel or perpendicular, just close.That’s how they tried to be; never the same, just close. 

They met in highschool, when Johnny dropped from the engineering program after finally realizing he did not want to work with unyielding numbers for the rest of his life. His whole schedule was redesigned and he ended up sitting right next to Kun in advanced English. They ended up inseparable within weeks and were therefore separated because they couldn’t keep quiet in class.  
Alike, but never the same. They liked to debate about books. They liked to work on homework together after school, sneaking into the back of the chorus room because Kun did choir and the teacher loved him and gave him special privileges. When Johnny was especially strung out from a difficult geometry problem or a boring piece of history, Kun would sit on the piano bench and serenade him with whatever song he could think of. 

They fell in love over half filled notebooks and square pizza and the one key on the piano that stuck down if you pressed it too hard. 

They stayed in love over late night phone calls and blurry snapchats and coffees they tried to share but were either too sweet for Johnny or too bitter for Kun. 

They fell apart over changing priorities and new friends and the fact that every seven years you have an entirely different set of cells within you. They fell apart over stubbornness and money and the fact that ‘I will always love you,’ doesn’t mean the same thing to a seventeen year old as it does to a twenty three year old. They fell apart over Kun’s unwavering grudges and Johnny’s tendency to people please. 

There is something called ambiguous grief. It is when you mourn the loss of someone you love while they are still alive; they have simply become someone you don’t recognize. 

Johnny thought the same thing happened to their relationship. 

What was once shared dream journals became separate bedrooms. What was once ‘I love you more,’ became ‘you too.’

“Will you come to bed with me tonight?” Johnny asked, reaching to take Kun’s hand even while he was typing. 

“I thought we agreed having separate rooms was better for us? You toss and turn all night, I won’t get a good night’s sleep and I have a presentation tomorrow.” 

Johnny almost grabbed Kun’s hand, but Kun lifted it at that exact moment to push the glasses up on his face. 

Johnny called it a loss. He hadn’t convinced Kun to cuddle in months-- they napped together after a quick fuck two weeks ago, but Kun went to his room after he showered.

“I miss you.” Johnny whispered. 

“I’m right here.” Kun said. 

He hadn’t been there for a long time. 

—- 

In hindsight, Johnny should have known. Kun left everything behind that wasn’t clothes and toiletries. 

Johnny thinks maybe he should have let Kun answer him all those months ago. Maybe hearing Kun say there was no love left would’ve made this process easier. 

**Kun: I really think you should throw that stuff away. You need to think about moving on, John.**

Salt in the wound. Johnny can barely read the message with the way his vision’s blurring. He stares at the phone screen for what feels like hours. Maybe it is, because he stares until his phone dies (but the battery was far from charged to begin with). 

You need to think about moving on.

Johnny doesn’t ignore himself crying now. It’s tears spilling down onto his half of the pillow set. He grieved the relationship a lot when it was in the final days, he knew Kun was slipping from his fingers, but he never let himself accept it. 

He built a monument to them, like a loyal subject to the memory of their love. He would have worshipped that altar unfailingly if Kun stayed silent. He would’ve brought flowers and swept the headstone monthly like a widow with a heart of steel. 

Even at the worst of times he convinced himself the old Kun was in there-- one in a million cells still the same as before, still in love with him. One fleeting thought that would conquer the rest. 

Johnny realizes at some point, maybe midnight, maybe five am, that he should have grieved for himself. He spent so much time trying to rearrange himself, to make his cells similar but not the same. To remind Kun they entered this battle together and used to whisper promises every night inside enemy lines-- forever. 

He grieves for himself. For years lost to his own selfishness. For becoming someone who could say cruel things to his lover, who lashed out instead of tried to communicate, who kept a mental tally of how much they hurt each other and thought being even meant they could be happy. 

Johnny’s breath hitches and he abandons the phone for a while. He goes to the garage and grabs for an empty cardboard box. There are some left over from Kun’s move. 

He comes back to the house and settles on his knees in front of the dining room table. He is not praying, he is pondering. Not everything sat before him has a happy memory. He grabs the one tshirt Kun left behind, all white except for a red stain at the collar.

\--  
“How else would there be lipstick on your collar, Kun?” Johnny shouted, tossing the shirt on the ground and staring at his boyfriend with tears threatening to spill in his eyes. 

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Johnny. It was a work event, I mingled with a lot of people.” Kun replied. They weren’t even fighting, not really. “I told you I would do my own laundry.” 

“So I suppose I can only blame myself for being upset?” Johnny asked with a harsh, squawking laugh. 

“Yes, since you’re the one deciding to conclude I cheated on you.” 

Kun left the house that night and didn’t come back for three days. Johnny didn’t touch his laundry again.  
\--

It feels like something Johnny should have seen earlier; spite. Kun took everything but left that shirt. 

There’s no reverence in the way Johnny shoves the shirt into the box, along with it the lobsters and the painting and he doesn’t care if it sounds like something broke. None of it is important, it’s all just stuff. 

He fills the box with the last of the items on the table. It’s nothing but junk now. A box people would pick through at a garage sale, the rubble of a great empire. He grabs another box from the garage and goes back through the house, rose-colored glasses removed and looking for every memory, not just the good ones.

When he’s finished it looks like a tornado came through the house. There are so many empty spots on the shelves and walls and counters. Dust is flying around, refusing to settle. Johnny is in a state of disheveled that only a shower can fix. 

The boxes are full and taped shut, absent only of the ring that Johnny hopes he can’t get a refund on. 

—- 

Taeil visits the next day and when he offers to take Johnny’s trash, he asks no questions about the boxes that he’s handed.

Johnny deletes Kun’s number and hopes he’s shed his final tears. The ghosts were exorcised. Bodies were laid to rest. The final stage of grief is acceptance and Johnny thinks he has his closure. His life can begin again.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is based off Object in Space by La Dispute 
> 
> This was posted as my first work back in August, but I wrote it in the notes app all in one shot when I supposed to be working. I deleted it a few weeks ago and thought I wanted to revisit it and make it something I was actually proud of. I think it makes more sense now so please pretend you've never seen it before if you happened to read the first edition (lets call that the rough draft). 
> 
> I am so sorry to both Johnny and Kun for this one. Thank you so much for reading and, as always, you can find me on twitter @suhjpeg.


End file.
